Caps in hand

A recent announcement from The Scientific World website has the chemical information discussion group CHMINF in something of a panic. Apparently, the medical database MEDLINE is to abstract the Scientific World journal. But how will it be referenced the chemical informaticians wonder. The official name is “TheScientificWorldJOURNAL”. And, yes, all those capital letters really should be there. CHMINF’ers worry that the abstractors will create a whole range of variations on this theme in typing up their abstracts, which means the journal might be listed under several different entries, such as Scientificworldjournal, TheScientificWorldJournal etc. and this could have enormous repercussions for getting to the facts. Or, maybe not. The real chance for panic was brought to light by Wendy Warr of www.Warr.com. She points out that there are probably countless mistyped references to systems such as Cerius-squared and RS-cubed, “STN Express with Discover!” with its bizarre exclamation mark and the word Discover in italics, and even the Royal Society of Chemistry’s “chemsoc”, which must never start with a capital “C”. Then there are molFile, MolFile, and molfile, ISIS/Base (no dash just a slash), ChemWeb and chemweb, and even SCIENCEbase.com, or is it Sciencebase.com?